And what a world they've found to sing about. The title track opens proceedings like a hand grenade rolled into a reggae session — a pulsating, bass-heavy anthem dedicated to Coseley, a Black Country town that the rest of the country has apparently agreed, by silent consensus, to forget entirely. It's a clever, generous piece of songwriting. Where lesser bands would reach for London, Manchester, or Liverpool as their totemic urban symbol, Shotgun Marmalade plant their flag firmly in the unglamorous middle of England and dare you to find it anything less than magnificent. The reggae groove sits underneath it all like bedrock, unhurried and unshakeable, while the lyrics do what the best protest songs have always done: make the personal political without ever once making you feel lectured.
*Fascist in the Workplace* has already earned its stripes as a live favourite and here, in its recorded form, one understands completely why. It is, quite simply, the song that every person who has ever suffered under a petty tyrant with a lanyard and a performance review template has been waiting for. The riff is gleefully antagonistic, the chorus lands like a resignation letter slipped under a manager's door at 4:59 on a Friday. It's funny and fierce simultaneously — a combination that is, frankly, much harder to pull off than it sounds.
*The Ballad of Chairman Pat* keeps the ska-punk engine running hot. There's a Madness-adjacent quality to the storytelling here, that same tradition of the English vernacular song dressed up in horns and offbeat rhythms — observational, wry, affectionate even when it's being withering. The arrangement suggests a band that has spent considerable time listening to both the Specials and the Pogues without sounding like either, which is an achievement worth acknowledging.
The album's DIY credentials are worn not as a badge of poverty but as one of principle. Recorded largely at The Mended Drum Studio, *Boomtown* has the kind of immediacy that expensive studio time often irons out — you can hear the room, hear the decisions being made in real time, hear a band that trusts itself. The production is clean enough to serve the songs and rough enough to serve the spirit.
Thematically, *Boomtown* casts a wide net. Politics gets its due — not the grand sweeping kind but the grinding, daily, institutional variety that shapes ordinary lives. Great women are celebrated, which is more than most of their contemporaries manage. And then there is, allegedly, a song about a bass player with fat fingers, which tells you everything you need to know about the band's refusal to take itself too seriously even when it's being most earnest.
The full lineup, reportedly the best-looking yet assembled under the Shotgun Marmalade banner, plays with the tight, instinctive communication of musicians who have spent serious time on stage together. The banjo, apparently, has been left at home for this one — a sacrifice that must have been painful but proves, on the evidence presented, to be entirely worthwhile.
*Boomtown* is precisely the kind of record that reminds you why independent music matters — not as a marketing category but as an actual thing, a set of choices made by actual people who care about what they make and why they make it. It is boisterous, political, funny, heartfelt, and altogether more alive than anything currently cluttering the mainstream. Get on it.
*Available on Bandcamp now. CD and digital out. Vinyl incoming. All the streaming platforms to follow, presumably once they've recovered from the shock.*